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Bioethics and Modern Technology: Reasons of Concern

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Bioethics and Modern Technology: Reasons of Concern 4 Bioethics and Modern Technology: Reasons of Concern Rolando V. Jiménez-Domínguez and Onofre Rojo-Asenjo Centro de Investigaciones Económicas, Administrativas y Sociales (CIECAS) del Instituto Politécnico Nacional México 1. Introduction Today’s world technology, more than any other human activity, is transforming our lives, our habits and life styles, the ways human beings relate to each other; it creates our material wealth and the bases of our progress and modern civilization, that is to say, our economy. It is not improper to say, in a word, that modern technology makes our world. However, this abundant source of benefits is not free from inconveniences, some of which may seriously endanger fundamental aspects of nature and human life [Arthur, 2009; Kelly, 2010]. Thanks to the scientific and technological advance during the last 150 years, infant mortality has been enormously reduced and life expectancy of people has almost doubled. We have found effective treatments for many diseases which were before mortal, and the hygiene conditions of most of the world population have been considerably improved. This has brought at the same time a huge growth of this population, which has grown from one thousand million at the middle of the nineteen century to almost seven thousand million beginning the second decade of the XXI century, what is giving rise to serious difficulties in providing adequate living conditions for every human being. Antibiotics have saved countless lives while making it possible for new and incredibly virulent bacteria to evolve. The convenience of e-mail turns into communication overload; face to face contacts are being substituted by screen to screen communications. Even our most publicized inventions can turn on us. Contradiction seems to be the name of the game: the past century was history’s deadliest, in terms of humanity’s technological capacity for organized violence. And yet life expectancies in the industrialized world, as mentioned, rose to approach eighty years. Nuclear energy developments have encountered useful applications in the generation of electric energy for many regions of the earth, as well as applications in the medical fields, but at the same time have created the possibility of massive annihilation of all kinds of creatures, including the human, and the destruction of ecology at large. Genetic manipulation is associated with our hopes for attainment of a life free of diseases and other sufferings, but it is also opening possibilities of interventions in the natural evolution processes of living organisms with unpredictable consequences. Any prediction based on the genetic determinism is nowadays strongly questioned, since there are no reasons to accept that the characteristics of a living organism are only determined by their genes [Ho, 1998]. www.intechopen.com 36 Global Bioethics – Perspective for Human Survival Experience teaches us that every good outcome from the scientific-technological progress is always accompanied by reasons of concern; there is an implicit contradiction in the progress: every result can be both beneficial and harmful, without the possibility to separate these characteristics; the old dilemma of good and wrong. But in this dilemma there is some degree of relativism which makes even more difficult the decision; sometimes what is good or wrong depends on the decisions-taker point of view. A dam which is used to provide water and electricity for a city is certainly good, from the point of view of those who receive this benefit. But perhaps the same dam required the displacement of thousands of people and destroys an ecosystem, and from this point of view is bad. The important questions are then: Who chooses? Who wins? Who loses? [Lightman et al., 2003]. If we consider some other recent technological advances, like genetics engineering (genetic manipulation, cloning, assisted reproduction), neurotechnologies, etc., we have to deal with more complex situations to decide between what is more convenient to be done and what we must avoid in order to prevent severe damages to human life and values. Thus we can convince ourselves that technology, which up to now we have seen as the best instrument man has to improve his life, can be at the same time a powerful means for transforming his nature and values in a way that is unacceptable for some of us up to the point of rising the question if man will be able to survive his ingenuity and creativity. In this work we shall be concerned with the implications that the development of modern technology has on human values, and in this respect we shall consider some specific situations which are already giving rise to ethical dilemmas requiring urgent answers. Next we review some fundamental concepts related to the problems at hand. In the last part of the work we shall discuss the topic of social responsibility and the role the whole society can play in search of solutions to the ethical problems posed by the technological advance. We end up looking for rational arguments to support an optimistic vision of our future technological development. 2. The impacts of technological development The technological development occurred during the past 100 years has provided the infrastructure needed to revolutionize the study, the knowledge and manipulation of life, including human life itself; it has changed and accelerated communications among persons and countries; it has altered the “goods and services” production systems while creating new and threatening problems which place humanity on the brink of extinction … or happiness! Today, starting the second decade of XXI century, the topics of our times are in connection with the most advanced technologies, which open for almost everybody the possibility of creative or destructive actions surpassing our most audacious speculations about future, not imagined before. In 1976, after the discovery of the recombinant DNA techniques and the potential risks due to its use which allow, in principle, the design of new living organisms with characteristics selected at will by the experimenter, the United States National Institute of Health (NIH) established the conditions required to carry out these kind of experiments, fixing the security levels corresponding to the varying characteristics of creatures under study. Nevertheless, some local authorities rejected these rules of national security and asked for the open discussion of these issues in committees designed ad hoc, in order to guarantee the free participation of all interested persons and avoid any alleged manipulation; in this way they expected to dissipate fears and distrustful thinking of the people. These committees www.intechopen.com Bioethics and Modern Technology: Reasons of Concern 37 would study all risks involved and propose recommendations about the convenience or inconvenience of authorizing experiments on recombinant DNA and, in case of approval, in what conditions. The deliberations were carried out but neither definitive answers nor compulsory measures were obtained, and much less agreement in all respects; but the proposed questions and the individually adopted answers opened the way for new approaches to the problem, based on questions like: Is it possible to separate the ethical issues associated with the experiments from those related to its applications? Is it possible to separate the creation of new forms of plants or microbes from the creation of new types of human beings? And assuming that genetic manipulation of human beings is possible in practice, what would be the prevailing ethics: that of human fraternity or the ethics based on the right to be different? Is commercial exploitation of recombinant DNA ethically different from commercial exploitation of other techniques? Does gene implantation from higher to lower level organisms represent a dangerous transgression of the barriers between biological species? Have we the right to interfere in the natural evolutive processes without knowing the possible outcomes? … etc. [Dyson, 1993]. In a different field of knowledge, the development of information technologies and social networks (Internet, Facebook, etc.) are drastically changing the political order and the traditional courses of action and modalities of citizen’s participation. It is not possible to predict the future course of events, but recent cases like those of Tunisia and Egypt could be replicated and perhaps the revolutions of XXI century will be done not with arms but with cell phones and will be transmitted by Internet, since these media provide the means to express the desires for freedom and justice that sometimes official censorship restricts through public broadcasting media and printed press. These are revolutions without visible leaders but with visible technology that connects people and enables common citizens to express their dreams and desires through message texts and twits. This sudden change in the ways people are connected comes together with another revolution that takes place within us, since cell phones enable us to be closer to distant persons and more distant of those who are near. If we observe any line of persons waiting for bus, show or restaurant, we notice that people are talking by phone with somebody far away instead of talking with their neighbors in the same cue. This occurs so frequently that answering a phone call and talking with distant persons in the middle of a social gathering is not anymore considered as impolite. Our values in this respect have changed. These facts convince us that social values change quickly as a result of the new communication technologies, and this is because eight of every ten inhabitants of this planet have access to a cell phone, what amounts to 5,300 million according to the International Telecommunications Union belonging to the United Nations. There exist today two thousand million with access to Internet and this number is growing every day. Modern communications not only put down tyrants; they also change our habits and customs. Our age is characterized by the success of physical technologies, in what has been termed Second Industrial Revolution: automatism, space conquest, atomic bomb, genetic medicine, cloning, etc.
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